Readicide - Killing the Love of Reading
I think a lot of educators agree that the "No Child Left Behind" Act has not really improved schools. The constant barrage of testing not only leaves less time for actual learning, but it's boring. In school, I am not even sure how many standardized tests I took, but it was a lot. I can't say I learned anything from them or ever felt truly challenged.
In Readicide, Kelly Gallagher discusses how we test too much in schools (yup), and how teaching to test destroys students' love of reading. I have read the first two chapters, the first of which covers the many downsides of testing. He provides evidence that teaching to test is actually doing a disservice to our kids. Breaking books down into smaller chunks to be analyzed to death, he says, makes students dread reading. From my own experience, I remember not enjoying English class very much when we practiced for testing. I ended up majoring in English, and I love reading, but I don't think standardized tests helped me to realize that in any way.
While reading his first chapter, I wondered what could be done to prevent this "readicide". He spends a lot of time explaining how it's bad, but I didn't see solutions until the second chapter, and his main solution was this: make students read. Not the kind of reading that bores them to tears, but rather, let students read for uninterrupted lengths of time, 20 to 30 minutes. Yes, during class time. This way they can learn to find the "reading flow"--the joy in losing yourself in a good book that many avid readers experience.
I like this suggestion for many reasons. I think it would be a good use of class time to encourage students to read. You can always assign reading as homework, but this ensures that they do it. I like the idea of letting them choose from a list of books to read for fun. One of my teachers did that when I was a freshman in high school, and it was honestly one of the most memorable experiences I had from any of my classes that year.
Also, if students have a certain chunk of time to read in class, that means teachers could use that time to catch up on grading and lesson planning. I recently read an article here on Edutopia about how to find the time to grade everything. Ideally, I think teachers should give students a lot of feedback, and I appreciated the tips in this article. I currently teach beginning and intermediate German at my university, and the limited class time and the way I run class doesn't really allow for grading during class, so I was worried about how I would find the time to grade when I am teaching full-time in a high school. After reading the Edutopia article, I was still skeptical, but Gallagher provided me with one solution for several problems. (I don't like the "one stone two birds" saying because I would never harm a bird on purpose!)
He also suggests having an "article of the week", something he got going in his entire school. He explains his experience with students who didn't know what Al Qaeda was ("Who is this Al guy?") and his realization that students lack basic prior knowledge on current events. So, by the time students leave his school, they've read a news article each week. By supporting our students in building their prior knowledge, we support them into becoming better readers.
So far, I really appreciate Gallagher's thoughts, and I plan to apply his suggestions in my own language arts classroom when I teach English at the high school level.
In Readicide, Kelly Gallagher discusses how we test too much in schools (yup), and how teaching to test destroys students' love of reading. I have read the first two chapters, the first of which covers the many downsides of testing. He provides evidence that teaching to test is actually doing a disservice to our kids. Breaking books down into smaller chunks to be analyzed to death, he says, makes students dread reading. From my own experience, I remember not enjoying English class very much when we practiced for testing. I ended up majoring in English, and I love reading, but I don't think standardized tests helped me to realize that in any way.
While reading his first chapter, I wondered what could be done to prevent this "readicide". He spends a lot of time explaining how it's bad, but I didn't see solutions until the second chapter, and his main solution was this: make students read. Not the kind of reading that bores them to tears, but rather, let students read for uninterrupted lengths of time, 20 to 30 minutes. Yes, during class time. This way they can learn to find the "reading flow"--the joy in losing yourself in a good book that many avid readers experience.
I like this suggestion for many reasons. I think it would be a good use of class time to encourage students to read. You can always assign reading as homework, but this ensures that they do it. I like the idea of letting them choose from a list of books to read for fun. One of my teachers did that when I was a freshman in high school, and it was honestly one of the most memorable experiences I had from any of my classes that year.
Also, if students have a certain chunk of time to read in class, that means teachers could use that time to catch up on grading and lesson planning. I recently read an article here on Edutopia about how to find the time to grade everything. Ideally, I think teachers should give students a lot of feedback, and I appreciated the tips in this article. I currently teach beginning and intermediate German at my university, and the limited class time and the way I run class doesn't really allow for grading during class, so I was worried about how I would find the time to grade when I am teaching full-time in a high school. After reading the Edutopia article, I was still skeptical, but Gallagher provided me with one solution for several problems. (I don't like the "one stone two birds" saying because I would never harm a bird on purpose!)
He also suggests having an "article of the week", something he got going in his entire school. He explains his experience with students who didn't know what Al Qaeda was ("Who is this Al guy?") and his realization that students lack basic prior knowledge on current events. So, by the time students leave his school, they've read a news article each week. By supporting our students in building their prior knowledge, we support them into becoming better readers.
So far, I really appreciate Gallagher's thoughts, and I plan to apply his suggestions in my own language arts classroom when I teach English at the high school level.
I really enjoyed reading your article and couldn't agree more on several aspects of it! Being French, the school system is quite different but we do have a lot of "standardized tests" that don't mean much. It reminds me of Einstein's quote: "Everybody is a Genius. But If You Judge a Fish by Its Ability to Climb a Tree, It Will Live Its Whole Life Believing that It is Stupid." This is a good way to describe what's going in schools all over the world in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of letting students read in class. To relate to the Edutopia article you mentionned, it would be a good time to grade for the teacher. I also teach French in my University and finding time to grade is difficult, mostly because I try to give as much feedback as possible. This would be a solution to both problems: how to find time to grade and how to make students read more.
The idea of reading an article each week does make a lot of sense in many ways. That would allow them to have more knowledge about certain topics that we don't have time to go over in class and make them better citizens of the world. I think I will also try to apply some of those strategies in my own classes. Thank you for sharing!
~Vanessa
I love your ideas here! And I agree with you about how many secondary classes kill the joy of reading.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like most of my English teachers in high school (and also most of my daughter's) insisted that we read dreary and depressing texts almost continually -- as though anything that brought enjoyment were less worthy of merit. I've gotten so much more out of Oscar Wilde than James Joyce simply because Wilde is delightful and brilliant to me, while Joyce's so-called genius is overwrought and self-indulgent in my opinion. And because it's only an opinion, your proposal to allow students more freedom to choose what they read makes perfect sense.
I also think giving students chunks of class time to read is good. Many kids are overwhelmed by the amount of homework they have and I am concerned that they can't really get a deeper understanding of a text if they're just trying to rush through it. This process also gives students the chance to talk to you right away if they're stuck on something or having a reaction they want to explore more deeply.
Finally, I want to use the "article of the week" idea! I can't think of a better way to get kids to better understand and discuss what is going on in the world than this. The beauty is that some issues would be in articles throughout the year, so students could see how problems/solutions evolve over time.
Thanks for your post and I look forward to reading more!
I agree with a lot of your ideas up here. Testing ad standards make it hard to actually teach and have meaning be apparent for students and it is really rather unfortunate that our system is getting to the point that teachers are being evaluated on how well their students perform on tests - this can never truly be accurate because I believe that there are too many variables that could affect how students are learning in the classroom that have nothing to do with the teacher (i.e. home and school community, previous teacher experiences, whether or not they are ELLs or ESLs, how well students do on tests - test anxiety is a thing and some students just don't do well on them, etc).
ReplyDeleteI think the suggestion to have 20-30 minutes of reading time is interesting, maybe not something that I would have them do every class period. Maybe once a week kind of a thing because I would still want to have activities and discussions that can really only happen in a classroom and while I do remember the English class where I was able to occasionally read in class the most, I also remember that same class for other reasons too (mainly how our teacher tied in relevant, significant ideas through the materials we were reading, and the discussions that she facilitated within the classroom as well as the provocative writing exercises).